By the mid-2000s, Seinfeld had been off the air for several years and Michael Richards wasn’t as in-demand as he was when the show was in full swing. Though Richards had started out doing stand-up comedy decades earlier, he was more focused on a career in Hollywood at that point. Interestingly enough, it was George Carlin who encouraged Richards to get back into stand-up when he was struggling to find work post-Seinfeld. As Richards explained to Rolling Stone in 2024, Carlin was curious to see if Richards could build an act after so many years away from the stage.
Nowadays, if Richards and stand-up are mentioned in the same sentence, chances are it’s in reference to the meltdown he had at the Laugh Factory in Los Angeles back in 2006. “Shut up! 50 years ago we’d have had you upside down with a f—king fork up your ass!” Richards screamed in a blurry cell phone video that was later obtained by TMZ.
Richards then repeatedly called the man the n-word, prompting him and many other attendees to walk out. If you haven’t seen it, you can take a look at the clip for yourself below—but be warned, it’s extremely NSFW.
George Carlin Encouraged Michael Richards to Do Stand-Up Before His Infamous Meltdown
Unfortunately for Richards, the outburst went viral, and, naturally, everyone had something to say about it, with the vast majority of people understandably condemning him as racist. But it was Carlin, who was partially responsible for Richards being on that stage in the first place, who might’ve had the most nuanced take of all.
While speaking with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette the following year, Carlin said that he understood what Richards was dealing with that night. “He was being ignored,” Carlin pointed out, adding, “That’s the worst thing that can happen to you in a club—not that they don’t laugh, not that they heckle you, but they don’t even listen, they talk among themselves.”
However, despite his acknowledgement of how frustrating the situation must’ve been for Richards, Carlin struggled to wrap his head around Richards immediately evoking the image of someone being lynched. “That had to come from a place in his mind where that already existed,” Carlin suggested.
“I don’t even have images like that. Even if I got mad at somebody, I couldn’t go to that,” he continued. “So you have to either have something in your head or not. You have to have a deeply held feeling about blacks or Jews or whatever it is, or you don’t.”
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